Day 2: Water Works

I slept like a rock last night. I was tired from a full day of traveling. I didn't wake up until my bunkmate, Rick, started down the ladder this morning. I took a quick peek at the clock on my phone and thought it was only six o'clock and I didn't need to be up until 7 to help fix breakfast. Before I actually fell back to sleep, my head adjusted that my clock is still on Central Time and I'm in the Eastern Time Zone now. So, up for breakfast I went. We will be eating big breakfasts and dinners but only eating snacks during the day while we are here. Today we had pancakes, scrambled eggs with ham/cheese and peppers, and fruit. It was a hardy breakfast before a tough day.

We headed out at around 9 to work the water truck and what had been hyped as what will be our most strenuous day, physically. Our Tap Tap followed a truck transporting 4,000 gallons of water into Cite Soleil. It is said that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and Cite Soleil is one of the poorest places in Haiti. Cite Soleil is a tent/shanty city of 200,000-400,000 people. Driving into Cite Soleil brought with it a myriad of sights and smells. Sensory overload really. Each block brought with it a different set of inputs. One block may smell like a latrine. The next may bring a vague burning smell. Going over a bridge, you see a slow moving stream that must fill with water during a rain, but now is filled only with litter. There is litter every where. There isn't trash collection so there is nowhere to throw anything except the ground. Potentially almost half a million people doing this. For generations. Imagine if all of St. Paul lived in tents without fresh water, with no bathrooms and with no sanitation pickup. It's mind boggling to think of the scale of the poverty here.

We arrived at our first water stop (of three) to be greeted by a crowd of women and children. It was like being a celebrity getting off the tap tap. The children didn't know who each of us was but they were excited to see a new batch of water truck people. Each of us was attacked by groups of children trying to get our attention. I haven't been called "Hey you!" so much in my life. The children are not only malnurished but they are starved for attention. When the children here reach the age of 2 or 3, they are commonly sent away from their homes for the day to forrage for food. Their parents aren't able to pay attention to them during the day because they have to try to figure out how to earn money or keep the household running. As a result, the children are very excited to see a truck of adults arrive to spend time with them and hold them. I learned that airplane rides and uppies (picking them up) are things that kids must love everywhere. "Un, deux, trois" followed by a quick toss in the sky or just to ride on my hip for a while were both big hits.

People here speak French-Creole but are taught in French in school. It's been quite a long time since I took high school French but enough of it came back so I was able to have conversations with the kids. One girl at this first water stop called dibs on me and didn't leave my side during our whole time we were there. Her name was Jillian. She was the first child I connected with. She loved that I was able to speak with her in a language that she understood. Her eyes lit up when I said "Je m'appelle Jeff". She loved that I asked her name and that I remembered what it was when she asked me if I remembered what her name was. I think she appreciated that someone took the time to learn her name and talk to her. She didn't want to let go of my hand the entire time I was at that stop. I was able to talk with her enough to discover she had a brother named Reginald. Reginald quickly became affixed to my other hand. Jillian lead the other kids in chanting "Je m'appelle Jeff". That's about as close as I'll ever get to the scene in "When We Were Kings" when the children chant "Ali bomaye!" to Mohammed Ali.

There was quite a bit of time spent playing with the children but that's one of the main reasons we are here; some of our local helpers could deliver the water faster without us if that's all it were about. Our jobs at and around the water truck consisted of one person aiming a large hose at a bucket with a helper working to make sure that the next empty bucket was ready to go and the line of bucket continued to move up towards the hose. Others on the team helped deliver the water to the people's shelters. We worked with the women and children to carry large buckets back to their homes. Buckets of water are heavy. Carrying heavy things on a hot day can lead to me sweating profusely. That may have happened today.

Carrying the water was a bit of an adventure. As we carried 5 gallon buckets of water, we would follow 8 year old children racing through narrow alleyways while balancing buckets of water on their heads.

I did not visit any tents today, but I did visit and walk through dozens of shanties. Most of these buildings had rusty tin roofing material for siding. Doors were primarily just draped fabric. More that a few houses had walls made from the plastic walls of port-o-potties. in some of the alleyways, there would be a channel in the middle of the walkway for sewage and waste to flow.

Aside from the conditions of the houses and the lack of fresh water, to me one of the most dramatic images from today was the beach. The beach is where people go to throw their garbage. It is where they go to the bathroom. It is where they sometimes bury their dead. It is home to pigs wallowing in the sewage. It is unbelievable.

Today is a day that will take some time to process. Now it's time for bed as tomorrow is the day that may be the day that is most stenuous for us emotionally.

- Jeff Gerst